“[All of our projects] share in bringing together research and artistic practices toward re-visualizing landscape as the starting point of design.”

The collaborative work of landscape architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha imagines new possibilities for design of the built environment and explores the lines separating land and water, and urban and rural environments. Their interest in how water and landscapes are visualized has taken them to diverse terrains around the world, including Bangalore, Mumbai, Jerusalem, the Himalayas, and, most recently, the Sundarbans in southern Bangladesh. Their design practice includes writing, imaging, teaching, and the use of a range of artistic media “to produce works and pedagogical processes that strive to draw out the material complexity and inherent dynamism of places,” they say. Their publications include Design in the Terrain of Water (2014), Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore's Terrain (2006), and Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001). The duo are currently at work on The Descent of Ganga, a multimedia exhibition examining the influence of human intervention on rivers, as well as da Cunha’s forthcoming book The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent. Collectively, their work has been recognized with the Architectural League of New York’s Young Architects Award, Penn State University’s John R. Bracken Fellow Award, and a Geddes Fellowship from the University of Edinburgh. Both Mathur and da Cunha are faculty members at PennDesign.